Whumptober: Day 18 - Muffled Scream
by Lif61
Summary: Sam and Dean go hunting at Devil's Foot Rock, Rhode Island, and Sam gets captured by a horrific entity.


**A/N: Written for day 18 of Whumptober 2019.**

**I did write this fic yesterday, but I was too under the weather to post. I got a procedure yesterday, so I have a bit of healing to do.**

**Prompt: muffled scream.**

**WARNINGS: This fic contains graphic depictions of violence and horrific non-consensual violations.**

* * *

The Devil's Foot Rock. Sam wanted to stay far, _far_ away from anything that involved the Devil, but Dean had assured him it was fine. He'd sat down on the hood of the Impala with him, looking out over the ocean, past the cliffs and craggy rocks, orange and yellow leaves blowing in the wind around them. Dean had even gotten him a beer, trying to calm him down, and he had him go over the facts: Lucifer was in the Cage, Heaven and Hell weren't interfering, Castiel was keeping tabs on Heaven, Crowley wasn't having trouble with demons since Abaddon, and Dean still had his odd relationship with the reinstated king. They were in the clear as far as Lucifer went.

Sam knew the facts.

He did.

He couldn't argue with facts.

Then why was his gut twisted into a knot? Why was sweat running down the back of his neck? Why was the beam of his flashlight wavering, his hand shaking? Why was his mouth dry, making it difficult to swallow? Why was the hair on the back of his neck standing on end as if he was getting watched? Why was everything in him telling him to run and hide and never look back?

"Dean, I don't feel good about this," Sam said. His voice came out scratchy, weak.

"Look, we're just gonna check out the footprints, see if there's actually a ghost hanging around them like those hunters over in North Kingstown said, and then we're done for the night. Nothin' to it."

"And if there is a ghost?"

"Easy, find out who the sucker is. Take 'em out. Ghost problem solved."

"Yeah, but Dean, it's called the Devil's Foot Rock."

Dean sighed, and turned to Sam, flashlight glaring in his face for a bit, making Sam take a step back, scaring himself as he stepped on a pile of dead leaves and a few twigs, hearing them crunch under his feet. He jumped and then paid attention to Dean again, who was clapping a hand to his shoulder.

"Sometimes a name is just a name, okay, Sam? Doesn't mean we're gonna come up against some big bad."

Sam swallowed roughly.

"You with me?"

He nodded, though he wasn't so sure.

"Come on, I want to hear you say it. You with me?"

Sam pressed his lips together, breathing hard, eyes darting all around him. God, he felt like he had to rip his skin off. It'd been touched by _him_. But if he ripped his skin off then he'd remember that _he'd_ done that. Blood. There was blood all over him. His own blood. It filled his nostrils till his stomach turned, and he grew faint, skin clammy. Sam could barely get breaths in, but he thought maybe he was breathing too fast, his chest ached.

Dean.

Dean was in front of him.

What was the last thing he'd said?

_You with me?_

Sam nodded slowly, feeling the corners of his mouth turn lower as he tried to keep the salad he'd forced down for dinner in his stomach.

"Yeah," he got out, voice rough with anguish spilling free. "Yeah, Dean, I'm with you."

Dean smiled, at odds with Sam's emotions, as if he was blind to all he was feeling. Though really, he knew Dean was probably just trying to be confident so as to not worsen Sam's mood. "Good, that's what I like to hear."

They continued walking along the dark trail, Sam's heart beating hard in his chest, blood rushing in his ears. It was dark, too dark. The trees with their leaves still yet to fall blocked any light from the stars that might've shown through the dismal clouds. And it was a new moon, so it was dark in the sky.

This didn't feel right. Sam didn't feel good about this. He was walking to _him_, a spot where _he'd _been. He just knew it.

When the trail turned from sand and dirt to gray rock, running at an upward slope that they had to climb Sam stood there, legs frozen. He knew what he'd find at the top. Dean began checking that his shotgun was ready, but Sam just stared, jaw locked.

"Sam, let's go!" Dean called, pumping the fore-end of his gun.

Sam snapped into action, hands numb. He told himself it was the cold air. His breath misted in front of him. He hoped that was the weather, or maybe a ghost. If it was a ghost they could just finish it and go back to the motel, and go to bed. They'd be done with it.

Nothing with…

Nothing with _him_.

Yeah.

Yeah, that'd be good.

Sam got his shotgun ready, hauled it over his shoulder, and followed Dean up the rock slope, chills running up his spine from the scrapes in the rough surface. He paused to run his hand along it. It looked like fingernails, as if someone had tried desperately to hold on. And it followed a pattern. The indents went from being shallower at the top to deeper, and then shallower again, as if the person had been shocked at getting dragged, and then had tried with all their might, and then had lost. Sam, curious, followed it, made his way back to the bottom, and let his hand trail off the end. His own fingernails were bigger than the marks.

A woman.

She'd been taken.

How she'd made marks into the rock that could be seen, he didn't know.

"You coming?" Dean called.

"The rock," Sam answered. "Someone… Someone was taken."

"What do you mean?"

"I… I don't know, maybe it was… Maybe it was a ghost or something."

He was shaking his head, trying to figure it out.

It didn't feel right to him, and for a second the scrapes did seem to fit his fingernails, so he rushed back up the slope. When he made it to the top, Dean was whacking aside tree branches, leaves and dead needles falling to the ground, some spiderwebs floating through the air till they dropped to the unforgiving earth. Dean made a sound of disgust and smushed something under his heel.

"Uh, think it's this way." He gestured with his hand, and led Sam off to the left.

At that, Sam couldn't help but think of all the legends where left-handed people, or anything on the left, were considered closer to the Devil.

They came to a clearing, and in that clearing, in the center of sand, dead underbrush, and fallen leaves and needles from trees, was a flat rock. In the dark it was almost black. It seemed to suck in all the light, and the footprints on it did so. Some of them couldn't even be called footprints. They were hoofprints. But the two separate prints were side by side, as if they'd been walked by the same being, the left a goat's hoof, the right a human foot.

Lucifer was an archangel, could take human vessels, but in his true form…

Shaking, Sam crouched down, studied the supposed goat hoofprint, hoping to not see it. For now his mind categorized it as a goat hoofprint. There were the two cloven sides, but he _looked_, and that's when he saw it, what he stared at and stared at, and what his mind couldn't process. There was no category in his mind, no word for what it was. There was nothing.

It didn't even fall under monster, because to call something a monster you had to know it. And unless you knew him you'd miss it entirely. It'd just be the hoofprint of a goat. So innocent, so… unassuming.

This he knew as the unknowable, as Lucifer, as some imprint of his true form.

As something he only knew as torturous, horrifying, and wholly incomprehensible.

Sam dropped the flashlight, fell back, and was pushing himself back as far away as possible, not even realizing he was scraping his palms until there were trails of red left in the dirt.

"Whoa, whoa, what is it?"

"I-I-It's him. D-Dean, it's him," Sam cried. "It's him."

He tried to turn his head away, but couldn't, only saw the dark indents, the footprints.

His ring finger on his left hand slipped lower, and he started, and realized it was one of the scrapes in the rock. His heart felt like it was going to fly out of his chest. He looked at the trees around him, making sure they _were_ trees.

Oh god, what if he… What if he was there?

Dean straddled him, hands grabbing his jacket.

"Sammy, he's not here. He's in the Cage. Okay? I promise you, he is not here. Those, those right there are just some stupid footprints."

"They're-they're… They're his. He's been here. He's been here."

"Okay, okay. So here's what we're gonna do, alright? I'm gonna get you back to the motel, get you in the shower, put a nice, big salt circle around your bed, give you your shotgun, and have an exorcism on the phone playing on repeat, how's that? You want a rosary too? You feel better with a rosary? Holy water?"

Sam didn't know how to tell him he wanted to _bathe_ in holy water, that he wanted to boil it and burn himself with it. And how could he explain that being back at the motel wouldn't be enough? No place would be far enough away.

His eyes drew back to the footprints, away from Dean and the dark shadows on his face, the faint glint of his eyes. They were dark, so impenetrably dark. Was there a deep red glowing from them, looking at him, _wanting_ him?

His upper lip trembled.

Sam closed his eyes.

No, he couldn't be like this.

He couldn't. Not around Dean.

They'd gotten him out of the Cage, they'd gotten his soul back, they'd patched him back together.

_Sam, you're _fine_._

He forced himself to take deep breaths, which only served to hurt his diaphragm because of how tense he was.

He opened his eyes again, and felt them wanting to draw back to the unknowable distinction in the prints that his mind couldn't process, but they found Dean.

"No. No, I'll stay. Let's do the job."

"Saving people, hunting things, huh?"

"Family business," Sam finished.

Screaming started up further out in the woods, so Dean went to check it out, shotgun held up by his shoulder. There hadn't been any signs of anyone else out there before, no flickering lights in the trees indicating flashlights, no voices, no footsteps, no smells, and now just the screaming. Hopefully a ghost. They could handle those. Humans were more difficult.

Sam stayed by the rock, too terrified to wander off.

The scream would die off after being held out for about twenty seconds. And then it was consistent, starting up against after about a minute. It rang out at the same intonation each time, clearly a woman, before it was violently cut off. It didn't become choked, or gurgled, as if some murderous violence had befallen her, it was just… gone. Like _she _was gone.

Sam wanted to call out for his brother, but he knew that he was out there, growing closer to that scream.

Panic built in Sam, resonating in his chest, as if some force were being pushed out from the hoofprints. They seemed to be growing farther away, and he hadn't even realized he'd been backing away from them until the heel of his right foot nearly slipped off the edge of the slope.

Adrenaline tingling through him, cold running up his spine, he fought to catch his balance.

A hand pressed against his back, and righted him.

Breath catching in his throat, Sam tried to turn, to see who could've possibly been standing on the rock, who would've been out there to help him. Surely he would've sensed them in some way. But he was grabbed around the middle, a dark arm holding him tight to a cold body.

"_De_—" he tried to cry out, but there was a frigid hand of rotting skin over his mouth.

Sam knew he could bite it, but the thought of doing so had bile rise into his throat.

"Mm! _Mm!_"

He tried to scream around the hand, to alert his brother that something was wrong. He kicked his feet against the ground, tried ramming his elbows back into his attacker, tried moving his hands to grab ahold of his shotgun so he could aim and fire a salt round. The thing threw him onto the ground on his stomach. It stomped on his back, knocked any air out of him, and it grabbed his ankles, dragging him out of reach of his shotgun. It lay near the prints in the rock, over the red that he was sure was watching him.

Sam tried to get in air, to cry out, to do _something_. He tried to fight, but the thing started dragging him away. It was _strong_, and he was soon dragging his nails against rock, through the scrapes.

They were the size of his fingers, and they filled with his blood.

Sam banged his head on a boulder at the bottom of the slope, and though he tried to writhe, to get out of its grip, to stay conscious, he knew no more.

* * *

He awoke in a deep chasm, the air around him cold, and damp, and frozen. Everything was gray, the sun not over the horizon. He was tied up, ropes going through tree branches and roots and the crags of the rocks. He wouldn't come free unless he was cut down, and they wound around his body intricately, pulling his arms up so that he was exposed. To the right of him, etched into the rock was a drawing of a coffin, and beside it were the words "_SEE YOU SOON_." That didn't bode well.

Before Sam, lurching about empty space before the opposite walls of the chasm rose thirty feet above him, was the thing. It was black, with rotting flesh peeling off of it, and it reeked of death. Sam gagged just from being near it, a strange noise even rising from his esophagus. He tried to make sense of what it was, if it was human-shaped, if it looked like anything at all, but it was just… There was no word for it. Sam was shuddering, sweating, and the inside of his head hurt, deep inside.

"What… What are you?"

It just hissed at him, staring.

It was on the far end, up near a leafy hill, and then it was right in front of him, grabbing his chin. Fear stabbed through his spine, and into his stomach, and he almost pissed his pants.

It clicked its teeth together, eyes meeting his.

The eyes. It was faint, but Sam knew those eyes.

"You're… You're him. Aren't you?" Sam asked. "An… An echo."

It leaned down, and Sam cried out, scrunching up his face as it licked his cheek. It pulled away from him, and he retched.

"Where am I?" he demanded.

The thing, the Lucifer Echo, didn't _speak_, but Sam felt it slither into his mind, as if it went through his mouth, and up his nose, through his throat and sinuses, finding its way into his brain. He couldn't breathe, felt pain, panicked. It wasn't holding onto him through this process but it was _in him_, and _god_, it _knew him_.

_**I have taken you where I took her**_**.**

_Who? Taken who?_

_**The girl.**_

_What girl?_

_**The girl. Many years ago. There was a girl. I liked her. And I like you.**_

_Do you know who I am?_ Sam managed to ask, tentative, even as his insides were writhing with black, putrid, oil.

It scoured deeper into him, wriggling through his brain, making Sam let out choked cries, and more of it fled into his mouth, caressing along his teeth, gums, and even his tongue.

_**You are Sam Winchester,**_ it declared.

There was a pause in which it used Sam's lungs to breathe with him, to leak into his blood. Ice, panic, wailed through his brain, and then the thing announced:

_**Mine.**_

The Lucifer Echo held onto Sam, tongue finding his lips, body finding his, and inside him, it found everything.

* * *

Dean lost Sam. There was no sign of him except for his blood in the scrapes on the rocks near the Devil's Foot Rock.

And then he saw the news from over in Massachusetts.

A place called Purgatory Chasm was closed due to some small earthquake, but Dean knew the real answer. He knew the legends, the haunting, the Hellhounds, the supposed presence of the Devil at least once or twice. His brother had to be there.

_Fuck!_ he swore to himself, cursing himself the entire ride over from Rhode Island. _This is what you get for not trusting your brother._

But how could he? Sam's damn trauma was always making his alarm bells go _ding! ding! ding! ding! ding! _

_God damn it!_

Sure, Devil's Foot Rock, kind of obvious, but people were always giving stupid names to things, and people had gotten murdered there.

Murder. Ghosts. Easy.

He screamed through gritted teeth, growled at himself, switched on the stereo, and lowered his foot on the gas. The Impala's engine roared in his ears.

* * *

Dean couldn't get through the hiking trail. Park rangers wouldn't let anyone through, and he didn't have time to get in an elaborate cover and lie, so he was hiking through tough wilderness. Eventually he found _something_.

He was over on one of the cliffs that overlooked the chasm, and far down below was a body that looked vaguely like Sam. It was big, had his clothes, his hair, and was all tied up but there was a… a _thing_ on him… or… or _in him_. Dean stared, using his binoculars, unable to make it out.

"The fuck are you, buddy?"

Upon closer inspection Sam's mouth was opening, and then Dean heard it, echoing off the rock, a muffled scream. It was deep, gravelly, speaking of some torment, and profound, horrific suffering that Dean couldn't understand.

_Shit, shit, shit._

_Gotta get down there._

By the time he'd managed to make his way down into the chasm a half hour had passed, but Sam's screams were still muffled by the thing that stunk of death. It was pulsing now, and Sam was writhing, hips bucking upward, sweat pouring off of him, voice even more horrible up close.

The thing hadn't noticed him.

Dean approached, footsteps as slow and quiet as possible. Sam hadn't noticed him, eyes squeezed shut, too caught in the throes of suffering. Dean swallowed roughly, sweat rolling down to catch in his eyebrow.

A choking sound came from Sam, energy pulsing from the thing, and a headache built between Dean's eyes. He lost his focus, banged his foot into a rock cropping out of the ground.

The thing turned.

Its eyes glowed red, and Dean stared.

Some unseen force pulled him towards it, everything coming together and blurring in his vision. His body arching backwards till he was sure his spine would snap, head tilting back, and then a hand, or what might've been a hand, was caught around his throat. He tried to scream, but his mouth was soon covered.

All he managed was, "_Mmph!_"

His eyes widened as it slithered inside him.

The thing seemed to largen, then lower itself in him, sigh.

_**Ah, Dean.**_


End file.
